Life’s Great Adventure

Getting On With It

Joy and Hope

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”, Albert Einstein once remarked.

Perhaps unwittingly, Einstein hit on something important for growth in the Christian life. All of us have challenges to face, large and small. But more often than not – and it is the same with so many areas of life – we simply have to keep going.

This point is worth bringing out because it can be hard being a Catholic nowadays, especially a practising Catholic. All too often our peers and friends are not that interested, or we have more pressing concerns, or there are other (seemingly more attractive and legitimate) options out there.

After all, God loves me, so what’s the big issue?

Such a question misses the point. Life in Christ is transformative. He is constantly speaking to us in our consciences, in those we meet, at Mass, in the Scriptures. He desperately wants us to meet Him personally, for ourselves. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, He famously says (John 14,6); we owe it to ourselves to take him seriously!

With practice and patience, it becomes easier to live a life of virtue in a confusing world. That is why St Paul reminds us that, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8,37).